The most important director Benicio del Toro ever worked with: “A huge moment”
Benicio del Toro‘s famous bout of flatulence in The Usual Suspects wasn’t the sole reason he gained celebrity status, but it certainly helped with his big break.
Since that iconic giggling moment in the police line-up, the star has gone on to much bigger and better things. Acclaimed dramas, multi-billion dollar franchises, awards galore, he has done it all. The lesson here? Never be afraid to let one rip.
His rise to superstardom has afforded him the opportunity to work with almost every great director on the planet. One of his earliest major movies was Terry Gilliam’s weird and wonderful Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and he’s appeared in two of Wes Anderson’s most recent movies, including playing the leading part in the ensemble of The Phoenician Scheme. While other notable collaborators include Rian Johnson, Denis Villeneuve, and Paul Thomas Anderson, according to the man himself, one filmmaker means more to him than any other.
Speaking with The Playlist, the Puerto Rican star namedropped Steven Soderbergh as his favourite and most important former boss. He referred to their first meeting on the set of Traffic, a film that changed del Toro’s life in more ways than one.
“When I was doing it, when I had suggestions, [Soderbergh] would really consider them,” he said. “He didn’t always say yes, but many of them were included, and that might’ve been the first movie where I was meeting with the director every Sunday and that after that I’ve done it or tried to do it ever since, meeting with the director every Sunday on a day off or 45 minutes to really talk about what we did, even when things are going great.”
Traffic is an ensemble crime drama embedded deep in the world of illegal drugs. Del Toro plays a Mexican police officer hellbent on preventing narcotics from crossing the border into the United States, for which he netted an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, becoming just the third Puerto Rican winner behind Jose Ferrer and the great Rita Moreno. As for Soderbergh, he achieved the rare feat of having two films nominated for ‘Best Picture’ in the same year, as Traffic was joined by Erin Brockovich.
The movie and its subsequent success sparked a strong working relationship between the two that saw del Toro cast in the title role of the epic two-parter biopic Che, chronicling the life of the handsome Marxist guerrilla leader Che Guevara. Even if Soderbergh does harbour some regrets over the project, the films are an impressive achievement, and in 2021, the two reunited again after a long hiatus to make the well-received heist thriller No Sudden Move.
Sure, del Toro’s star would have stayed alight without Soderbergh’s guiding lens, but their conversations on the set of Traffic had a major impact on the then-aspiring performer, which led them to further successful collaborations. Given that the director is currently churning out movies at the rate of about one every two weeks, we can expect more from the duo in the near future.
